But of Kors! Well, what can we say: After all the post–Sept. 11 promises to be "subdued" and "respectful," Fashion Week has gone ahead and swallowed the city like a great big billowing peasant blouse …. Designers Michael Kors ( Ralph Lauren crossed with Isaac Mizrahi ), Oscar de la Renta (rich, ruffles and some question about when he acquired the "de la") and Anna Sui (bohemian, "kooky") all exhibit their fall offerings today …. If you're like us , you kind of like reading about this stuff in magazines on the StairMaster , but the thought of elbowing your way past the ghouls into an actual show makes you want to collapse onto a recliner-where you'll probably happen upon your beloved mate, alarmingly mesmerized by one of HBO's queasy, profoundly unsexy "documentary" sex programs -but tonight you can have it both ways as actors Susan Sarandon (ageless babe ! but what has she been in lately?) and Alan Cumming (bouncy wee fellow) auction off some "designer" La-Z-Boy chairs in Chelsea to benefit Bailey House, which provides shelter for homeless people with AIDS.

[All fashion shows are by invitation only: Michael Kors, the Gallery, Bryant Park, Fifth Avenue and 41st Street; 11 a.m., fax 221-1952; Oscar de la Renta, the Theater, Bryant Park, 1 p.m., fax 382-1181; Anna Sui, the Theater, Bryant Park, 7 p.m., fax 590-5101; La-Z-Boy auction, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, 6:30 p.m., 633-2500.]

Only three people left on Earth, and they still have relationship problems! Welcome to the plot of director Harry Ralston's The Last Man , starring Boston Public 's Jeri Ryan . After-party at Veruka, which we think was almost hot in 1998. Who needs Peggy Siegal? Answer: You do!

[Village East Theater, 189 Second Avenue, 8 p.m., party to follow, Veruka, 525 Broome Street, by invitation only, 888-0080, ext. 309.]

Thursday 14th

Get out your headdresses, girlfriend s: Bob Mackie, who dressed Cher for her flamboyant years-and who we have the strangest feeling is about to make a big splashy comeback -today shows a collection inspired by "the Broadway musical." If that doesn't jangle your spangles , there's always Ralph Lauren , the favorite of the set that would be horsy. Later, Carolina Herrera (renowned neatnik, likes polka dots) launches Chic, a new fragrance. Spritz away, folks; nothing wrong with it!

[Bob Mackie, the Gallery, Bryant Park, 11:30 a.m., 633-1400; Ralph Lauren, 650 Madison Avenue, 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., fax 857-2584; Carolina Herrera, the New York Kunsthalle, 210 East Fifth Street, 7 p.m., 564-6367, ext. 35. All by invitation only.]

St. Valentine's Day?! Hmm, how to endure this distressing, high-expectations holiday ? How about HurryDate's "Valentine's Day, Shmalentine's Day Bash" down at South Street Seaport, a turbo-charged version of Jewish "speed-dating," in which 50 men and 50 women go on 25 three-minute dates in 75 minutes? It costs $30 to participate and- in a rather creepy nod to voyeurism -$10 to observe . "The people that come are just really fun, open-minded, spontaneous, adventurous, well-heck-I'll-try-anything-once kind of people," said Adele Testani, a bubbly 26, who co-founded HurryDate with a high-school buddy, Ken. Has she met any fellas? "I haven't actually, but Ken has met a few girls." Meanwhile, in the even creepier world of "highbrow" speed-dating, The New Yorker stages a night of readings from its trove of love stories and poems, read out loud by every gal's dream guy, comedian Al Franken. Camisoles de rigueur.

[Valentine's Day, Shmalentine's Day Bash, Pier 17 Atrium, South Street Seaport, 7 p.m., make reservations at www.hurrydate.com; The New Yorker "Fiction Love," the Cutting Room, 19 West 24th Street, doors open at 7 p.m., 691-1900.]

Friday 15th

Beene there, done that! Fashion Week, which should be called Fashion Fortnight , ends today with some veterans: grumpy genius Geoffrey Beene ; Donna Karan , who we hope is beginning to emerge from her New Age–chiffon phase; and Mr. Clean, Calvin Klein . You probably don't have the stomach for all the after-parties to follow, but do you have the stomach to see Britney Spears and her abs in Crossroads , her big movie debut? (No New York premiere, sorry-we really do need Peggy Siegal!) Waking Up in Reno , a Patrick Swayze–Charlize Theron road-trip picture produced by Billy Bob Thornton , was also scheduled to open today, but when they found out they'd be going up against Britney's road-trip movie they postponed it indefinitely. And that's all the "insider showbiz dirt" we have for you at the present time.

[Geoffrey Beene, 37 West 57th Street, second floor, 10 a.m., fax 980-6579; Donna Karan, high-concept place to be announced, 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., fax 865-9876; Calvin Klein, Milk Studios, 450 West 15th Street, 6 p.m., fax 292-9131. All by invitation only. Crossroads , 777-FILM.]

Saturday 16th

"Kumbaya" has been known to make the sturdiest men weep, and tonight in the Bronx -which is the new Brooklyn, now that Brooklyn is the new Nolita - Whitney Houston's unflaky mom, Cissy, will belt out that tune and others as she headlines a 20-song gospel review, Gospitality . Bring Mariah Carey.

[Lehman Concert Hall, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, the Bronx, 8 p.m., 718-960-8833.]

Sunday 17th

If Robert Redford were our daddy, we'd be spending our days on the ski slopes and our nights stoned out of our minds, padding around the cabin in Navajo moccasins with a steaming hot toddy-but his actual daughter, Amy , went to Dalton and then insisted on being an actress, and you can see her tonight in Golden Ladder , a new play about a daughter with a Jewish father and a Christian mom. "I grew up wanting to be Jewish," she told us. "I loved it! I loved the customs; I loved going to people's houses for Shabbat; I loved everything. Is there a better language than Yiddish?" Now she's 32 and married. Does she dream of a day when she won't be referred to as you-know-who's daughter? "I'm not going to hold my breath, 'cause I'll run out of oxygen." What's her favorite of her dad's movies? " Jeremiah Johnson ." Does he have a secret nickname for her? "I'm not telling you." How is she similar to him? "Bad teeth."

[The Players Theater, 115 MacDougal Street, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., 239-6200.]

Monday 18th

Your boyfriend is glued to the TV watching the luge competition in the Olympics with a troubling intensity …. The "Games" officially started a week ago in Salt Lake City, Utah, but so far it's been a bit of a snooze, with curling and snow boarding (a fake sport). The hype begins today -ya got yer ice-dancing and, tomorrow, ladies' figure-skating short program. Whom to root for: nice, clean All-American girls Michelle Kwan and Sarah Hughes …. Anyone else miss the days when ice skaters were knee-whacking white trash, doleful Eastern Europeans with dormant drinking problems or, at the very least, vaguely sluttish?

[Ladies' figure-skating on Tuesday (that's tomorrow), NBC, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday 19th

Hockey or Hockney? Much like Fashion Week before it, the Olympics grind on; the women's hockey semifinal is today … but if you don't like the sight of sweaty babes "checking" each other, there's David Hockney's Stage Works , an exhibit of paintings and drawings from the artist's designs for the Metropolitan Opera Company's 1981 production of Parade .

[Hockey, MSNBC-or is it CNBC?-1 p.m.; David Hockney, Richard Gray Gallery, 1018 Madison Avenue, 10 a.m., 472-8787.]

Wednesday 20th

Ah, the literary life! Web-site proprietor, author and "man about town" Thomas Beller has self-published a quickie book, Before and After: Stories from New York , about New York pre– and post–Sept. 11, culled mostly from his spiffy Web site. Tonight some friends read aloud from the book . Bonus dirty excerpt from the "Before" section: "I like to show a little midriff."

[Ivy's Books, 2486 Broadway, 7 p.m., 362-8905.]

reader. Slippery streets. Gray skies, mufflers pulled tight, boots stained by

salt and mud. Despite the solstice, darkness still falls in the early

afternoon, shrouding the lampposts, the fire hydrants, the no-parking signs. On

Broadway the fluorescent tubes in the corner deli are dead-eyed white, like

they are in a hospital corridor, or the halls of the Department of Motor

Vehicles. Starbucks is dim, behind the frosted windows the velvet chairs are

threadbare, the linoleum floor in need of mopping. I consider a latte , but reject the idea. At the moment,

Starbucks is as inviting as the lobby of a flophouse down on the Bowery. The

Hudson River drives on to the sea, carrying solid, jagged ice blocks on its

back. I have a cold that makes my shoulders ache and my nose flood and my head

useless, losing its shape like a pumpkin left in the field long after

Halloween.

I think of the Caribbean. Red

flowers climbing vines. Turquoise seas and rum punches. I think of white sand

and warm sun on my shoulders. I banish the thought. Melanoma paradise, boring

days watching cloudless skies. Anyway, I've done that and I know that you can

have a cold in the tropics too, and that if I'm going to escape I need to go

farther away. Perhaps a trip to the Amazon? I could look at rare birds and

watch the canopy of the rain forest heave and shift as small creatures with

long grasping tails run along thin branches that dip with their weight. On the

other hand, there must be bugs in the Amazon-millions of bugs per square inch.

I'll bet they squeeze through the mosquito netting. I could write about lost tribes

and the clearing of the land. I could photograph the tree stumps and the dead

birds-or not. There is, after all, malaria and yellow fever and diseases of the

eyes and the skin and the gut just waiting for Upper West Side ladies who

venture where no sensible Upper West Side lady should consider venturing just

because it's four in the afternoon on Broadway and daylight is sliding away.

In my salad days I thought I

would be an expatriate, perhaps sharing the bed of a down-on-his-luck count in

the back streets of Montmartre. In my salad days I thought I would leave no corner

of the globe unvisited. I thought I would never read National Geographic while waiting for my dentist because I would do it

all in reality: mountains and valleys, cities of the dead, tombs of great

Pharaohs. I would follow the trail of Marco Polo, sip tea in Red Square,

Tiananmen Square, Piccadilly Circus, exchange stories with the royalty of Nepal

and wash myself in the river where Hindu gods had once been sighted. I admired

explorers who died with their boots on and Isak Dinesen, who went to Africa and

caught syphilis. I thought about Morocco and Paul Bowles and dreamed of riding

camels with families of Bedouins who would adopt me and marry me off to one of

their handsome sons. But, in fact, it didn't work out that way.

I have no one to blame but

myself. It seems when push came to shove I didn't want to leave the children

behind and they had school schedules and were less interested in exotic places

than in friends and regular meals with food they could easily recognize. It

seems that worry about money-the very same money that I once thought was a

concern of small minds-became a steady companion of my days and that tuition

was the only wild beast I would end up feeding year in and year out. I had a

mate who could not float free around the globe at whim because he had

responsibility and roots and work he wished to do. It turned out that I didn't

want to be without him. I don't sleep well when he is not in my bed. So

journeys were postponed.

I lived one life, mostly in

Manhattan and its environs. I did get to see the ruins at Chichén Itzá, and I

did see Shakespeare at the Barbican, and I have seen the cypress trees in

Jerusalem and bathed in the Red Sea, but my passport has many blank pages and I

am a provincial New Yorker-as provincial as they come these days. I have

friends in Spain this very moment, others in California and some in St. Bart's

splashing in the surf. I have relatives who live on golf courses in gated

communities in faraway Miami. They drink fresh orange juice and ride with the

top down along the Tamagami trail, waving at alligators in the nearby glades.

What am I now but a matron-a plump

bourgeois with life insurance and coffee cups that mostly match?

I suspect that to be in New

York in January is like being in the city on a hot July weekend: walking around

with a "loser" sign dangling from your neck. Maybe I'm singing the blues

because I've never been to Venice, although I have read Thomas Mann and George

Eliot.

Somewhere else there are cafés

with people gesturing madly to one another, intrigue at the tables, political

passions spilling on the floor. Somewhere someone is starting a revolution,

rethinking the local pieties. Somewhere someone wants to ask me to dance, to

have a brandy on a terrace overlooking the pounding sea. Somewhere the autumn

of one's life never arrives and the winter is all sleigh bells and white ermine

coats and clean snow turning into crystal beads that coat the bare branches of

the trees. Somewhere is not Broadway where the Indian cashier in the newspaper

store has his fingers wrapped in a towel to keep them warm and the child in the

stroller is wailing for reasons unknown, but valid enough I'm sure. No one is

going to win the lottery on this corner. This is why I feel a sorrow on the

streets as I head to the local Gristede's to buy some pasta sauce for dinner.

It was my life to do anything or go anywhere with, and here I am on 101st

Street thinking I might break my ankle or my neck on a patch of ice.

The problem seems to me to be

the same one that afflicted my youth. Choices have to be made. You can't be

everybody at once. You can't open a door that you locked shut. You can't keep

on trucking on every road in the country.

Is sneezing a symptom of

anthrax? Is nature not the original bioterrorist? Is spring a figment of my

imagination? How far away my nice, warm bed seems.

The wondrous truth is that by

now I have seen so many movies and read so many books and gone to the theater

and seen seven lifetimes of Gilbert and Sullivan, The Nutcracker and Monday Night Football , and I've watched

the evening news so many evenings that a permanent crawl snakes its way through

my brain night after night. I am stuffed with more than it might appear if you

just saw me waiting in line to pay for my pasta sauce, my nose red, my boots

not as waterproof as promised.

You too, I know. My friend, my

reader.

commentators keep telling us. Everything is altered, nothing is the same as

before, all is irretrievably different since the planes flew into the World

Trade Center. "Everything changed": This phrase has been shouted from every

media rooftop in America, and it simply isn't true. For those who lost

mothers, fathers, children, of course

everything has changed, but everything still would have changed had their

beloveds died in their beds, in car accidents on the highway, by murder, in a

war or from disease. It is the terrible, unspeakable loss that has changed the

lives of the victims' families, not the spectacular and unusual

terrorist-caused catastrophe itself.

The change that the

editorialists speak of has to do with the sense of safety that Americans used

to enjoy, the distance we felt from the famines, floods and political upheavals

that affect and infect most of the earth's population. But, really, how changed

are we, and how unprecedented is this piercing of our self-satisfied armor?

Oswald changed the world's course. Napoleon changed the world's maps. Hitler

changed what we can conceive of doing and being done to other human beings;

Hitler reduced our ideas of progress to a pile of useless dust. The Gulf of

Tonkin incident, lie or not, created widows by the thousands. Pearl Harbor was

a surprise, but not an entirely unimaginable one. World War II was a change

from the prewar era, but history is always bringing change-some of it good. The

telephone changed the world. The automobile changed the world. The discovery of

penicillin changed the world. The brilliant idea that physicians should wash

their hands before touching their patients changed the world. The computer

changed the world, but perhaps not in so profound a way as the television set.

The fact that airlines will be even slower to depart and later to

arrive is a small change, after all. The fact that Bush's numbers are sky-high

in the polls is a change, but one that no one (not even his guys) believes is

permanent. The fact that Americans are more aware than before of their Muslim

neighbors, and the fact that every schoolchild knows that in foreign places

crowds of men in strange headgear jump up and down shouting "Death to

America!", is not a change in the nature of the world we live in or an

unprecedented sight. Remember the huge crowds in Bavaria hailing the Nazi flag

amid the torchlight parades?

The way we know the world has

not changed one iota since Sept. 11: We do not have to reconsider our

philosophy or our religion. We have always known that Cain and Abel were not

the best of playmates. We have always known that the poor resent the rich. We

have always known that an absolute conviction in the rightness of your God

above the other fellow's is a dangerous matter. Ask any Protestant; ask any

Catholic; ask any Quaker, any Jew, any Bahai or Hindu or Sunni Muslim. The list

goes on. There is nothing shocking in Osama bin Laden's rejoicing at the deaths

he caused. We have always known that it is within the human capacity to eat the

brains of the conquered in a post-fight feast. Missionary jokes aside, being

willing to die for your faith is just a heartbeat away from being willing to

kill for your faith. No news there. Nothing has changed.

Our private lives-or the

majority of our private lives-are altered more by the threat of recession than

by the sight of the crumbling towers. Our lives, while lived in the context of

our country's history, are more importantly lived in the daily efforts

we make to keep bread on the table, to keep the body from falling apart, to

conceive the children, to guide the children, to have someone to kiss at

midnight on the New Year, to save a little in a retirement account, to take a

vacation, to get a better job or hold on to the one we have, to improve our

minds, to get into the latest movie or purchase the newest DVD.

It is true that some folks have gotten the shakes. They are

afraid to live in New York. They are afraid to fly, even though joining the jet

set on their rounds is definitely the patriotic thing to do. They avoid the

subway and dinner downtown. They are not believers in the

lightning-never-strikes-twice theory. For these people, the world has not

changed in the least; they were always anxious and expected the worst. Now they

have a focus for their anxieties. Now they have a new, most fashionable

disguise. For some, these fears of vulnerability have existed since their

toilet-training days, or earlier. For others, events-personal ones: loss of a

parent or a home, enduring a cruel caretaker, poverty, disappointments-have

left their mark.

There is an intersection

between our private lives and history. But that said, we are living in history

now-in 2002-in just the way we were in 6000 B.C.E (before the Common

Era). This living in history is not a sudden

new plague infecting Homo sapiens. At some times, communal history is more

obviously intrusive on our particular

bodies than at others, but it is always there. Nothing is new about that.

The problem with the platitude or cliché or moronic opening for

the current-events talk show is that it tends to stand in the place of real

thought and stops us from exploring the meanings of what has actually happened.

It has a nice dramatic ring to say "everything changed." But what does that

tell us-other than that a good phrase has a life of its own, and that most of

our op-ed talk-show hosts are plagiarists at heart? The phrase speaks to the

Lord of the Rings in all of us: Good

and evil do battle, and good shall triumph. Where, alas, is irony, perspective,

humility before the long line of human experience? Where are the facts? Yes,

this is the first time foreign terrorists have attacked American soil

successfully. But how big a change is that from the explosion at the federal

building in Oklahoma City? It changes whose passport we might scrutinize at the

airline check-in counter, but does it change how I exercise daily, what my

genes are up to in my body, my nail-biting habit, my contribution to my 401(k)?

It does not. Does it change the borders of countries, or will it lead to the

creation of a Palestinian state? It may be a part of the process that leads to

one, but certainly not the first or only cause.

There is something dumb loose in America right now. It is our

President speaking to us as if he were reading from a second-grade primer.

Perhaps it stems from Mr. Bush's speechwriters, who are afraid their man can't

deal with commas and qualifiers. Or perhaps it is the repeated use of the word

"evil" to cover an enemy who is evil,

but also more than that; the "wanted dead or alive" language that obscures the

actual complexity of events and appeals to simple instincts, fueling hot

emotions instead of clear thoughts. There is something really dumb about the

reduction of vocabulary to the repetition of catch phrases that is afflicting

our television and newspapers. Is this a sign of early Alzheimer's given to the

nation by some bioterrorists, who are right now laughing at the result of their

malicious mischief?

Hanukkah was not designed for its contemporary American fate. Here, it goes nose to nose, Maccabee to Jesus, against the Christmas glory. It has become a kind of echo of the Other, a comfort to the Jewish child who does not share in the red and green and tinsel of the rival holiday. This making much of Hanukkah is a wise adaptation, a bending like the willow in the wind, as a small minority fights to hold the hearts of its children in the overwhelming and most enticing surrounding culture of Santa Claus and Rudolph and the Grinch, as well as "Silent Night" and "Good King Wenceslas" and "All though the house, not a creature was stirring …." No matter what one does with the brave freedom fighters of old Jerusalem, they do not quite equal the pageantry of mangers and little drummer boys as God's own son is born to save the world from death. There is no contest here, because the story of Hanukkah is not the central story of Jewish belief or life, while the story of Christmas is the most basic matter of Christian belief. You could remove Hanukkah from the Jewish calendar and Judaism would barely notice. Do the same for Christmas and the entire religious structure would collapse. These holidays are simply not symmetrical. No amount of chocolate coins and electric menorahs illuminating the lobbies of Manhattan apartment buildings will make it so. Yes, they are both winter tales meant to promise the return of spring. Yes, they are both about the intervention of God in human affairs. But they are not equal, and pretending so will not wash.

Secularists can celebrate one or the other, or, as in many of today's homes, both, since everyone needs a holiday, a tradition or two to keep despair from the hearth, a celebration to prompt connection and reinforce tribal unity (or dual tribal loyalty). But Hanukkah was not meant to carry Jewish identity and central religious meaning, and I for one feel a little silly carrying home my blue-and-white Hanukkah paper, which I have picked out of a sea of red-and-green rolls. I would prefer Hanukkah in February. I am now very clear that as a Jewish woman, my holiday is not Christmas, as much as I wish friends well and enjoy the music and the color that it brings. I am also clear that Jewish identity in America still gets the December shakes. I suspect that will always be so.

Saying this is not to denigrate the loveliness of the menorah, the candles burning, casting their reflection upon the window pane. This column is not meant in any way to be disrespectful of the family gatherings, the presents exchanged, the perfect taste of latke and applesauce, such as we have in our house. And it is important that Jewish families can paste the dreidel made in nursery school on the front door in place of a wreath. And it is important that Jewish families remember that the battle for dignity and nationhood has been long, and that moments of success and great triumph, resistance and heroism have been ours amid the tragedies. But despite the fact that salespeople in Saks and Bloomingdale's will avoid saying "Merry Christmas" and wish their customers "Happy Holidays" instead, the joy of Hanukkah is bittersweet. The victory preceded defeat. A heartbeat of history away, exile is on the horizon. The miracle of the oil that burned eight days is much appreciated as a sign of God's presence in our journey, but it is not exactly the equivalent of a virgin birth that signals salvation.

I had been raised with a Christmas tree, as had many other Jewish people in the 1940's and 50's. Then, there were no Hanukkah cards in the stores or menorahs in public places. Now, many more Jewish families announce their identity with a menorah on their table. In the long run, this will help preserve the Jewish voice in America and allow our contributions to the culture at large to continue in the years ahead.

But the menorah itself is not quite the right symbol for Jewish identity. I feel this especially this year, as we see the warrior Sharon defending the streets of Jerusalem and Haifa with guns and bombs, and as we see–grasping the arms of our chairs with anxiety–that the battle for the promised land is still not over (how many millennia will it require?), and that the settlement building and the occupation of the West Bank has created exactly the situation some of us on the peace side, on the Labor Party side, predicted 20 years ago. It's a situation that may have no solution, one that turns the Jewish people into tyrants and occupiers and the Palestinians into suicide bombers whose mothers have no hope for their children but heaven.

Yes, the blame falls on the Palestinians for missing the last moment for compromise, but the blame also falls on the Israelis responsible for the doubling of the numbers of the settlers in the years since Oslo. Arafat and Sharon, two blind men, are pushing each other over the cliff, thinking only the other one will fall.

It is hard this year to fully appreciate the Maccabees, unless perhaps you are Palestinian, fighting in the hills against the better armed invaders. Nationalism itself seems such a bitter affair. Bloodshed may well produce heroes, but it has its blind, dumb, cruel, blockheaded side. (A nagging voice in my head asks if the circumstances had been other, would the Maccabees have taken to suicide bombing?) Today's news from Jerusalem is grim. I am glad it was reclaimed then and now, but the miracle we need has not yet come, and it seems beyond our human capacity to create it ourselves. Peace Now has turned into Peace Never, and lighting the menorah this year is not so much an act of sweetness and light as it is a sign of resolution to fight on. Maccabee every one of us, willing or not.

The affairs in Israel make Jewish identity in America even more crucial to Jewish survival. By that I don't mean we need bigger numbers to give money to the Jewish organizations that are pounding on our President to support the right wing in Israel. They have enough as it is. Those Americans, defenders of other people's right to die, dedicated to transfer or endless occupation, are hurting, not helping, matters. I mean the rest of Jewish America, who will raise our voices in the interests of peace and justice for both Jews and Palestinians, and in the course of time continue our Jewish life in America: Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, gefilte fish, bagels, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Woody Allen and their younger versions, and the professors, scientists and entrepreneurs, the chicken soup with matzo balls, Passover, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, mezuzas, making the small contributions to human culture that those in the Diaspora have always made.

This year, perhaps, instead of the menorah representing simply the gift of burning oil in the midst of war, I will think of the candles in the past and in the future, providing light for poets and novelists, for philosophers and scientists, in gulags and ghettos, in the midst of exile, on the edges of frontiers, to continue working through the darkness of human history.

I want him to surround himself with folk who have vocabularies longer than their pinkies. I want him to be that fellow in a suit who can strip in a telephone booth, change into his running clothes and find his way to the Throgs Neck Bridge in case the Triborough gets blown up. I want someone who can imagine that the dear little guy with a drooping mustache selling hot dogs on the corner might have anthrax in his mustard bottle. I don't want humility in our civic leader. Humility is for hermits in their caves. I want arrogance and confidence and rudeness galore-otherwise we are going to get rolled.

What about honor and goodness and caring for the poor and the wasted? What about remembering the million neediest cases and the saddest sacks and America's promise to the huddled masses? And what about just plain decency and respect for differences of style, skin color, religious inclinations, etc.? Of course Mayor Bloomberg needs all that-or at least he needs to convince us through many photo ops that his heart is good and that he loves firemen and policemen and homeless men as well as financial wizards and Broadway stars. Civic survival depends on a fiction of emotional connection, one to another. Just show up, please, and look sad when you should and happy when you should and, like a good master of ceremonies, warm up the audience for the acts to follow.

I don't care what troubles Mayor Bloomberg's sleep. If his heart is threadbare, I don't want to know it. I want him to convince us that a moral being is at our helm. A few gestures in that direction will do. I'll get worried if he begins to act like a saint and takes off his winter coat and offers it to an unprepared tourist from Florida. I don't want him bringing medicine to AIDS patients; I'd rather he figured out which hospitals are bloating their take and which are doing the right thing. I'd rather he found us the money to reduce class size in schools than bounce children on his knee.

I don't want him to go soft on crime. I want him to seem stern to criminals, as well as to greedy unions and racial flacks who would have us at each other's throats given half a chance. I don't want him to be nice to teachers who aren't doing their job or parents who ignore their kids or school custodians who mope instead of mop. I don't want him to be thinking about who loves him all the time. I don't even want him to be lovable. The mayor of this city should be able to shed a tear for the cameras but never descend into bathos or excessive affection for one pressure group or another. Don't favor the bird-watchers over the runners, the Korean grocers over the Thais, or the Orthodox Jews over the black Baptists. Think of them all as hungry mouths snapping at the empty air. Feed them in turn when you can, fool them into thinking they are getting more than they are if you have to, listen to their complaints about each other, then go to the opera or the Hamptons, eat a good meal, clear your head-it's money and management that matters. Dream money dreams; be a money man. Think high finance, and jobs will follow. Leave the poetry to the experts.

I have my doubts about the small quality-of-life issues being such a big deal. I don't really see how imprisoning the squeegee men or the turnstile jumpers changed our crime rate. It didn't seem to effect the number of crazy men who got into the subway and pushed women in front of trains. But this is not a political issue for the barricades. If Mayor Bloomberg wants the police to get the litterbugs and squash them, that's all right with me, but he shouldn't be fooled into thinking that the guy who drops his half-eaten chalupa in the park is the same fellow pushing cocaine in the projects. Don't worry, Mr. Mayor, I don't think you can ever get all the guys with powder in their jacket pockets from pushing and pulling at the dark side of urban life. The porn theaters will thrive whatever you do. The needles may or may not be exchanged, but they will be used. The kids will not do well on standardized tests next year (or the one after that), and the shelters will be full, and life in our city will continue to teem with grief that no politician can cure.

Urban life has always been perfumed by the smell of the sewers. Broken hearts have always been more numerous than roaches in the pipes. The parades are sure to be tacky, and the police are not all beyond corruption. The people going to the opera in their finery may or may not have embezzled, cut corners, been cruel to their children, betrayed their wives or husbands. There are flophouses and brothels, and places where your child can gain an advantage over a less advantaged child on her SAT's. There's gay-bashing and just plain bashing and snobberies enough for every citizen to feel superior to his neighbor. The city is not manageable like ancient Athens. We lack slaves, and women also vote (which probably screws everything up). So enjoy the spectacle, keep the books, push back if someone pushes you, but don't expect to cure what ails us. Recognize that we are disreputable and not very nice, but notice that we have a strong pulse along with our chronic high blood pressure.

This time of year, the schoolchildren begin their journeys from the far corners of the city to midtown to view the Christmas windows, to see Santa and make a wish. There they are, in lines, getting on and off the subways, teachers trying to keep order, stragglers rounded up, a lot of yelling and orders to be quiet, stay in line, etc. Name tags on strings dangle wistfully from each child's neck, and somehow the sight saddens. They are paraded into the glitter, and single file they take in the Rockefeller Center tree, lights blinking. Think of it: There is no way that the Mayor could make this pilgrimage truly happy, the children moving freely on the crowded streets. There is no way that most of these children can ever have the dream world offered on Fifth Avenue. A good Mayor knows that going in. He can play Santa at the Christmas party on the cancer ward, but he can't make chemotherapy a picnic.

All I want from Mike Bloomberg is that he work without illusions, think of himself as a money manager for an entire metropolis, bring Washington and Albany to heel and be friendly to tourists. Welcome and bienvenue , life is a cabaret....

I was shocked and amazed by what I read. Skimming the page, I saw that the plan calls for a fleet of 2,000 speedboats, each named after a Texas town, to be docked at midtown piers for regular weekend service to the Hamptons. This fleet is to be owned by a private corporation that will also own the upstate reservoirs, charging a minimum for each glass of water that New Yorkers pull from their faucets. There is no reason, it states, that the water supply should not be privatized and streamlined for more efficient service and increased fiscal responsibility. Customers who do not pay on time would be cut off.

I started at the top. Most alarming, I read, the plan puts aside $10 billion for digging for oil beneath ground zero, pointing out that the income from a 100-story office building is insignificant compared to that derived from oil gushing from a hole right under the Nos. 1 and 9 subway lines. The only endangered species involved would be financial companies, local sandwich makers and T-shirt vendors, and there would be no problem in providing space for them elsewhere. Perhaps with the proper tax incentives, the administration suggests, they would like to relocate to Austin, Houston or Corpus Christi, which also has a harbor view. The next paragraph warns that it might be necessary to defend its vision against naysayers who complain that several of Dick Cheney's former colleagues have already incorporated something called Ellis Island Fuels and are planning to issue a stock offering.

The plan recommends selling Central Park to the New York Yankees and building a conveniently located stadium above the reservoir, which could be filled in with sand and gravel cheaply imported from the Southwest. Objections to loss of recreational space, dog runs, ball fields and fruit trees could be met with the offer of a permanent Ringling Bros. tent at the north end of the park. Here, inner-city youth can learn to be human cannonballs prior to enlisting in the army, which will accept circus training in lieu of a high-school diploma.

On Cortlandt Street, they'll build the extensive Yellow Horse stables, where New Yorkers can learn how to ride. Horses will also be available for sale. A relative of Dick Cheney's has already registered his logo for saddle blankets, which will feature a stallion's head atop a shrunken Empire State Building. Interborough trails will be created and maintained, so that instead of taxis driven by turbaned men waving American flags protesting too much, the means of local transportation will eat apples and have hooves.

The administration calls for the Statue of Liberty to be moved out of the New York Harbor, where she is a conspicuous target, and placed in Montana (on Cheney's ranch?), where the F.B.I. can almost guarantee her safety.

The Bush fax also requires a large wooden horse to be pulled across the Manhattan Bridge and parked in Chinatown. This horse will be large enough to hold several thousand ranchers and cowhands ready to clear the land of urban blight in return for certain real-estate deeds to buildings confiscated by government inspectors. This will bring a healthy variety of economic activity to the island of Manhattan, which has been given to high-rise, Eastern-elitist thinking for far too long. The fax says that the stock exchange itself, depending as it does on technology, belongs in a location better equipped to its needs, like the Lone Star State, with all its sandy flatlands and accessible bayous.

Several paragraphs argue that since it is constitutionally impossible at the moment to bring God into the schools, it might be easier to bring the schools to God by granting tax rebates in excess of $150,000 a year for all parents-regardless of their income-who choose parochial education for their children. In return, parents will have to agree to attend speech-therapy classes in order to learn to speak more slowly. This will make New Yorkers much more popular in the rest of the country.

Since everyone knows that wit and high SAT scores are major New York resources, the plan calls for a large subsidy in the form of tax breaks and cash incentives to those parents who send their children to Dalton, Trinity, Buckley, Brearley and several other schools whose names I couldn't make out due to small type. These schools will also receive vouchers payable to large construction companies whose chief executives have children at the particular school involved to pay for extending buildings skyward, adding , building indoor swimming pools and providing vacations for families of the enrolled at the European city of their choice.

The government will put all homeless shelters, halfway houses and hospital clinics serving the uninsured on barges that are accessible only by pricey water taxi, thus keeping the client lists down. ACLU offices will be condemned on health grounds by a grateful city administration; subsequently, the ACLU may find it difficult to locate alternate office space. Perhaps they will move to the Alaskan tundra, where they can easily operate without disturbing any breeding wildlife. Disney has offered to take over the East and West Village. Every year they'll host a real county fair, with an emphasis on patriotism and heterosexuality as a positive gender choice.

Of course, this is just a plan. On paper, it sounds worse than it probably is. After all, it will be met with opposition. New Yorkers aren't going to just roll over because we're at war with terrorists-I don't think. We like our taxis, and we are not going to let a theme park take over our annual Halloween parade, nor are we going to let anyone dig beneath ground zero no matter the profit factor. I think it's just a rumor that Mike Bloomberg's uncle runs an ostrich farm in Lubbock, Tex., and his aunt has made a bid to take over Balthazar. I hope I haven't alarmed anyone by making this plan public, although I am thinking about moving to Paris just in case. Whoa, I tell myself, don't get stampeded out of here.

It is said that Rabbi Neulander was a charismatic leader of his congregation. Charisma requires a certain hubris, a certain love of the limelight, a kind of manic energy and a sense of one's self as special that can sometimes tempt a person across the line of human decency. Many middle-class killers have great smiles.

I admit I'm surprised that a religious leader could be such a cad-and probably a murderous one at that. More sophisticated friends have laughed at my naïve expectation that he should be a good man simply because he's a rabbi. But just because he went to rabbinical school and learned how to marry and bury and comfort the sick and knows how to read Hebrew and can find his place in the Torah and knows when to open the arc and when to sit down does not mean that he knows that his wife should not die, as I imagine her, on the rug she bought at a New Jersey outlet store at an amazing discount. Maybe I was fooled by the fact that the Hasidic branches of Judaism have rabbis who become revered like saints and found holy dynasties that last for a hundred years. I guess I thought that all rabbis were in the mold of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King. You'd think I hadn't read The Scarlet Letter or Elmer Gantry or known of errant priests and fallen televangelists with their hands in the pockets of the born again and many-times-fleeced.

They serve kosher food in jail for a reason. There are souls behind bars who won't mix meat with dairy but who have cheated, stolen and probably murdered. Religious behavior has nothing to do with purity of soul, obedience to the Ten Commandments, love and respect for others. George Bush, are you hearing me? Still, one likes to think that serving as a religious leader would at least reduce one's chances of being a rapist or paying someone to kill your wife when she becomes a burden.

These days, the mixture of religion and murder seems especially significant. When the spiritual leader of a community appears to have offed his bride, we can try to puzzle out the murderer's human failure. We can recognize his sin in our own nasty thoughts, dramas and movies. None of us are beyond imagining murder. This case is a welcome diversion, because when we think of those fellows putting anthrax into envelopes, we cannot fathom our common humanity. We cannot picture them playing ball or flying a kite or learning to use the potty. We cannot understand what drives them. We do not have the vocabulary to describe or the ability to truly understand this kind of mass killer, the anonymous murderer who hates us for what we represent. The terrorist is neither mad nor without conscience. His pathology is that of a large group whose interests he serves. He isn't really a madman or a sociopath. He is a soldier in the army of his people who behaves like a madman or a sociopath from our point of view, but from another vantage point is seen as a battlefield hero. Let's hope we never see the world as they do. Can you imagine a TV series called Band of Brothers about suicide bombers broadcast every Sunday night years after the fall of Israel and the defeat of the West? Can you imagine the stoning of adulterers in Shea Stadium and the closing of university doors to women, or the cover of Vogue showing simply a pair of eyes in a veiled face? No wonder I'd rather read about the rabbi and his girlfriend.

Since divorce is permitted to rabbis and no longer causes such a scandal in the Jewish community, one wonders why Rabbi Neulander did not simply leave his wife, hire a lawyer and enjoy the rest of his days frolicking on the Jersey Shore with this sweetie or the other women who might have followed? The answer has to be that he didn't want to make the financial sacrifice that a divorce would have required, or that he couldn't face the public failure of his marriage because he thought of himself as perfect. It is also possible that he hated his wife and wanted to remove from the world her breath, her footprints, her presence. He might have needed her to die. Years of a bad marriage can do that. We don't know how she made him feel-small, short, rotten?

I am not defending him. There are no meannesses in marriage that justify murder. It's all right to tear up the wedding album or to hire the fiercest lawyer you can find, but to hire a killer crosses the line into the lurid light of tabloid fever. Our legal system has such a limited definition of madness-the inability to distinguish right from wrong-that we will never know if this man is missing a piece of his head or his heart.

Nor will we know whether this rabbi was a lifetime fraud or a believer in God who lost control of his soul when lust and pride overthrew the more common virtues of the more common man. Of course, such questions do not really matter today. The rabbi will be forgotten with the turn of the page. We are reminded that holy men are not always holy, and that God would do better to remove the middlemen and speak for Himself. Biochemical fears are upon us now, and our individual failures, our sins and our virtues, will neither save us nor kill us. Our bodies are caught in a new political swamp, one crawling with dangerous creatures that threaten to turn us all into faceless, powerless victims of people who cannot truly hate us because they do not know us.

I was there in 1970, marching on Washington with babies in strollers and friends by my side, shouting at the Congress, shouting at the passers-by outside the Capitol, singing peace songs in buses that left New York in the wee hours and returned in the dark of night. I went to the teach-ins and ached with all my soul for the children living in the hamlets we napalmed. I believed that the war was unwinnable and that communism would not take over the entire world if we allowed the Vietnamese to run their state according to their tastes, make their mistakes on their own rice paddies and let our guys-addled and wounded, confused and abused-come home. I was not alone. Busloads of us could be mobilized in a few weeks' time. We flinched at the sight of the American flag because it represented the triumphalism of a military state that was trampling other peoples' lives. In those days, I did not feel patriotic. But I do now.

The difference is not just that I am older, although I did consider that possibility with care. The difference is that now the enemy is not trying to determine the fate of its own country. This enemy has killed us on our own soil and wants to force us to our shaking knees. It rejoices in our fear and loss. It is not a political difference we have with the Taliban and the terrorists they shield. It is a moral difference of a life-and-death sort.

These particular Islamists hate us for our prosperity and our pluralism; they hate us for our support of Israel, claiming that they will not be satisfied until we have abandoned Israel and withdrawn our forces from all Arab countries. They want to force other Muslims to live as they do, to hate as they do, to keep their women out of schools as they do.

This is not a shadowy bad guy set up by the military-industrial complex to sell munitions. This is as real an enemy as Hitler and his Nazi party. Yes, there is such a thing as someone hating us to death, and it has to be stopped. It isn't sane to talk nice and throw bones to someone who wants to devour your heart and boil your brains in your blood. "Nice kitty" is not what you say to the lion with his teeth poised above your head.

These are not peasants who would rather plant soybeans than kill boys from Kansas. These are boys from Kandahar who want to kill boys from Kansas and blame all their trouble on the Jews. Just as the isolationists who wanted to keep America out of World War II did not care about the lives of the six million Jews who were soon to be exterminated, this current pacifism in the face of a hard, cruel fascist expansionism can also end up being murderous.

No, we shouldn't antagonize populations on the ground. Yes, we should bring food to the hungry and shelter to the uprooted. Yes, we should stay on in Kabul and Kandahar, but only insofar as we are allowed to restore order and economic growth to that already-demolished country. But we shouldn't feel like evil colonialists. Our culture is less oppressive than theirs. Our way of life leads to better medical care and inventions that make our days pass more pleasantly than theirs. This does not make our country or the Judeo-Christian religion superior to any other. Germany was considered the apex of Western scientific and artistic accomplishment, and look what they did. But right now, those fundamentalist believers in Allah who rejoice in the killing of innocents are hardly the finest examples of what human beings can be. It may not be politically correct to point this out, but there is no valor in false humility, especially when there's a knife at your throat. It is a good thing to feel the pain of people all over the globe. But while we are doing that, we must remember the pain of women living under the Taliban's rule, we must remember the pain of our own people who lost so much to the gleeful bin Laden.

While America may be arrogant sometimes, that's not all we are. We are incredibly generous to those in need. We do have isolationists who would rather we went it alone, but they do not represent the majority. Yes, we should have paid our United Nations dues sooner, and we shouldn't break nuclear-missile treaties, and we should behave with more courtesy as we stamp around the world, but we are not attacking others because we don't like their values. We are a complicated democracy, and our interest in the wide, wide world flickers and fades from time to time. This doesn't mean we shouldn't fight when we have to-and now we have to.

Should it turn out that we do something unnecessarily cruel or destructive, I may change sides. If it turns out that we should have kept our armies at home (and instead, each of us taken a pen pal from the crowds we see on television burning George Bush in effigy), then there will still be time to join a peace party, pack a sandwich and ride a freedom bus to our capitol. But these days, I smile at flags as they blow in the breeze. Now I think the college kids making antiwar noises are blowing rancid smoke in our faces.

Not every situation is the same. Not every attack on a foreign land is unjust. Civilians will die in this affair, and they shouldn't. But the answer is not teach-ins and protest marches. I want us to find the terrorists in their cells and wipe them out before they wipe out more of us. I want us to get the regimes that protect terrorists and make them reconsider their goals. Then we can talk about Israel's crazy policy of meeting violence with more violence without a simultaneous push for peace. Then we can talk about Marshall Plans for mountain towns with unpassable roads. Then we can let a thousand flowers bloom. Then we can talk about a fair share of the land for the Palestinians. Let's put the peace movement back into its mothballs. Let the music from Hair blare through every shopping mall if it must, but let's keep our resolve to conquer them clear. Let's hope our government can conduct this action with bravery and dignity.

He flourishes as a flower in the field

The wind passes over it and it is gone

And no one can recognize where it grew.

Reading these words in the Yom Kippur service last week, a great chill came over me. The thought is hardly new. Most 6-year-olds already understand the bare facts. But day after day, we have been looking at the pictures and absorbing the life stories of young men and women passed over by the wind and removed forever from their place, leaving behind families, friends, grief everywhere. Our papers have relentlessly honored the dead in all their particularities. Perhaps in other centuries, when death was more common and loss of beloved ones expected, people were better protected against the shock we are experiencing. Today, when it is rare that a father of a 2-year-old dies or a recently engaged young woman is carried off, we look at this carnage and feel afraid. We read these stories with empathy and caring, but that's not all: We are each reminded in our bones how "fleeting is breath," how little control we have, how fragile our bodies, how random our fates. It is this we are taking in with our morning coffee.

We hear of the man who stopped to buy a Madonna CD and therefore missed the elevator that would have taken him to his death on the 83rd floor. We hear of the man at Cantor Fitzgerald who wasn't at his desk because he was taking his son to his first day at big-boy school. We know that someone hurried and arrived early at work, and someone else had a bad cold and took the day off-and that these small matters made the difference between life and death. It could paralyze a person, this recognition that turning left on Broadway would bring you safely to your destination, but turning right on Amsterdam would put you in the path of a truck. How to move when the result of any one decision could be deadly? Once again, we are confronted with our profound inability to protect ourselves.

It is this truth that is making people rush off to buy gas masks that will undoubtedly prove useless in a real chemical cloud. It is this truth that is making some talk of leaving the city for quieter pastures and causing others to purchase cases of bottled water. This is a time for magic, the more primitive the better: If I use a blue toothbrush, I will be safe. If I am kind to my nasty uncle, I will be rewarded with a long life. If I implore my God, he will keep me from harm. This is also a time when most of us understand that special pleading will get us nowhere. The wind comes and goes and new life grows, covering the spaces left behind. We don't want to think in terms of eternity, time, history, the tiny self falling from the huge building, plunging toward extinction. But now we can't avoid it.

We know about private cancers that begin in chemical errors. We know that age will take us all in proper order. But under ordinary circumstances, we can deny such knowledge. We can each assume a mantle of immortality as we go about our days. This mantle develops a few holes as we enter middle age, but it still covers the soul. Our own end is accepted as a fact but considered unlikely-not now, not soon, not ever. For most of us, it is not considered at all.

But now our healthy, normal denial (not to mention our self-importance) has been mocked; the curtains have been ripped away. The self we spend so much time nursing, examining,

attaching to others, stroking and insuring, reassuring, we see

today as mist, cloud, dust, nothing. How do we accept the shortness, the unfairness, the randomness of death, our own death?

This is the subject behind everything New Yorkers are talking and writing about now. The Mayor-who would have the rules changed for him, would bend the democracy to his will-is a man who has himself received a very personal death threat from fate. Is he hoping that extending his worldly power will extend his life? Does he see himself as a phoenix rising from the ashes, his body a metaphor for all New York? I would tell him that the wind passes over politicians, too, and that in a hundred years, no one will know just what he did or where he grew. It is better to protect the democratic order of things, which just may last longer than the power of any one man, whomever he may be. "Where are the snows of yesteryear"-a line of poetry from a man who narrowly escaped death on the gallows in the 15th century-will one day apply to the destruction of the World Trade Center as well as the multitudes of human beings lost.

The grief counselors, hoping to blunt the ravages of loss, are moving among the survivors, meeting in lobbies and offices. It is as if they are trying to dry up the East River with rolls of Bounty towels. This trauma is not post-stress, not clinical, though it may become that for some. This trauma pierces through all armor, frightening us the way a child feels listening to sounds in the dark that might be a giant closing in for the kill, or might be Daddy washing dishes in the kitchen.

We feel better when our talk turns to politics. Thank you, Mayoral candidates one and all. We feel better when our generals are locked in cabinet rooms, making plans. But for now, what is called for is bravery. Not the kind that the police and the firefighters showed, which is truly glorious and adds fine plumage to our human story, but rather the more mundane kind of bravery that makes it possible to go to the store, to get on a plane to Chicago, to ride the subway, to plan a vacation, to let your children go to school and your spouse go wherever work requires. We don't need gas masks or supplies of Cipro. What we need is the courage of the ordinary. The bravery we must carry with us is the kind that absorbs the closeness of death, recognizes its presence among us, but continues living anyway, gradually rebuilding the dikes of our denial back to the days before the flood. We need to learn once again to ignore the occasional signs of death's presence. This requires a kind of valor, too, an overcoming of panic, a determination to live as fully as possible, taking as much of each day as we can with decency and love and effort-ordinary effort-despite the fact that the smell of death remains among us.

the borders, entered our city and proved to all that we are mortal, that our

buildings can fall, our Pentagon split apart. Our planes can be pirated, our

steel structures melted, our sky filled with ash covering our faces, cars,

street signs. Our cell phones can be muted, our bridges closed, our

firefighters buried under tons of concrete. Pompeii

was an act of nature, impersonal, neutral, containing no political agenda. This

was a deed of men possessed of righteousness, engaged in a holy war. But it

will change no policy, shift no balance of power. It will not, whatever the

dark visionaries may assume, please their god or earn them a place in the world

to come. It will simply make us grieve for our dead and feel unsafe in our

streets.

Our generals speak of war against the United

States, but it is not war, army to army, as

we have known it. It is Gulliver tied with a million threads, lying on the

ground while the little folk pinch his skin. We want Gulliver to jump to his

feet and crush like bugs those who would harm him because they are afraid of

him. That would make us feel better, but it would accomplish nothing. Retaliation

brings immediate satisfaction, but in the long term it spreads the infection.

The terrorists have succeeded in making us hate, in defeating and ridiculing

those who want to heal the rifts between us. When we see the Palestinians on

the West Bank rejoicing at the death in New

York, dancing with each other, waving joyously to the

camera, we despair for peace. A wrenching fury boils within. Perhaps we will

cool down. It would be a terrible thing if we, in our frustration, mistreat

strangers among us, those of the Muslim faith. Let's

not grant the terrorists the victory of pushing our minds into the mud of

ill-conceived slogans, self-righteous zealotry.

They have contempt for our culture and all its trappings,

but they are not a mighty nation. They are shabby pirates of the air. Stopping

them should not require a full-scale war. We dignify the outlaws and criminals

when we make war against them. Police actions, yes; crackdowns, yes; strong-arm

them, yes; crush them like bugs, absolutely. But remember: They are a ragtag

group boasting of bad deeds, misunderstanding their own religious teachings,

poisoned by hate.

It is dangerous to use

the word "war" when we mean something more akin to a street fight. If the

language gets overblown, we may overshoot our target; what started as a fire

may become a conflagration that consumes far more than its original cause

warranted. We should call our response what it is, a scramble against outlaws,

train robbers, kidnappers. Those are skirmishes we tend to win.